ABSTRACT
Our desire to research BDSM practices and risk-taking behaviors among men who have sex with men (MSM) emerged several years ago and is aligned with previously funded ethnographic research projects on bareback sex, gay bathhouses and risks, online gay cruising and risks, and 'swingers' and risk-taking behaviors, all funded by CIHR, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Mobilizing the poststructuralist scholarship of Deleuze and Guattari, this chapter refers explicitly to their concepts of lines, machines, and the body-without-organs in order to interpret the empirical data collected over the course of four months in three major metropolitan Canadian cities. Desiring-machines result from the combined force of social productions and desiring-productions. The essential mechanism of the despotic-(State)-machine (DsM) is that it brings together the components necessary for inscription and overcoding. Traditionally, most forms of 'sexual' activity place a strong emphasis on genital stimulation, often in the form of penetrative or oral sex.
